The left’s Assange double-standard

20 December 2010, 12:00am

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Thoroughly enjoying the feminists tying themselves in knots over the case of Julian
Assange. I wrote in the Sunday Times a week ago that lefties were compromised over the chap: hero for embarrassing America, less of a hero for allegedly raping someone. Back then the very angry
campaigning group Women Against Rape put out a statement which seemed to suggest that they were not unequivocally against rape, if it was committed by someone like Julian Assange. Their concern for
the two women whom Assange was accused of raping or sexually assaulting had, somehow, diminished.

These double standards are fascinating. I suspect that if Assange regularly blacked up and performed “Mammy” for friends the left would still find a way to exonerate him. The emails he
has sent to some other women – those he’s not accused of having raped – are deeply weird and stalkerish. He is, I think, a wrong ‘un with a messianic complex. And while that
doesn’t affect the morality one way or the other about the wikileaks stuff, it casts a bit of light on his motives.